Monospaced ligatures

I’ve designed a monospaced typeface. It’s intended for running text, not programming. There are three f ligatures (ff, fl, fi). Does it make sense to leave them in LIGA or should I stick them in DLIG to avoid confusing people? I’m inclined to go with LIGA because it looks cool and most people have no idea how to use discretionary ligatures. But before I do I’m checking to see if there’s a way for this to go horribly wrong.

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Comments

In the few monospased fonts that I have seen with ligatures, they looked ugly and cramped so I’d rather not have such ligatures on by default. Ligatures would also break the promise of monospaceness of the font, well unless they occupy as many cells as their individual characters.

The purpose of ligatures is to provide an alternative for clashing or overlapping characters. The /f ligatures you mention are merely the most famous example, because in a lot of fonts the overhang of the /f runs into the dot of a next /i or /l.

With that in mind: why would you need a ligature -- any -- in a monospaced font?

The only reason /fi and /fl may appear as single character (!) in a monospaced font is not so it would be used as a "feature", but rather because these two are valid codepoints in a few legacy character sets.

I have seen ligatures in monospaced typestyles used with the older Hammond typewriters that preceded the Vari-Typer. Some of the catalogs in which the styles are illustrated are online. So I know it's been done, strange though it may seem.